Toby Young

About 15 years ago, I tried to interest my literary agent in a state-of-the-nation novel set in 21st-century London. My model was Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s masterpiece about New York in the 1980s. I’d read Wolfe’s essay in Harper’s magazine called ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast’ in which he urges ambitious young authors to dispense with namby-pamby, post-modernist experimental nonsense and follow in the footsteps of Balzac, Zola and Dickens – write realistic novels documenting every aspect of contemporary society in granular detail. I wrote a 10,000-word proposal summarising the story, which began with a black teenage drug dealer coming to the rescue of a posh teenage girl in Shepherd’s Bush by fighting off a group of roadmen trying to steal her puppy.

Earlier this week, GB News again found itself at odds with Ofcom. The channel had written to the broadcast regulator asking if, in light of the Supreme Court judgment affirming that the word ‘sex’ in the Equality Act means biological sex, it could now treat the dispute between trans-rights activists and gender-critical feminists as a ‘settled’ matter. ‘Broadly settled’ was the phrase Ofcom applied to the ‘theory of anthropogenic global warming’ in a guidance note issued in 2013 stating that broadcasters were no longer under an obligation to be impartial when discussing the issue. GB News wanted to know whether the regulator would extend the same latitude to debates about sex- and gender-based rights. Incredibly, Ofcom’s answer was ‘no’.

God, men are pathetic. At least, that’s the view of Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a researcher at Stanford, who has come up with a new term to explain the emotional labour women are having to do to help men cope with their psychological problems: ‘mankeeping’. According to Ferrara, ‘patriarchal masculinity’ stops men from developing ‘emotionally intimate bonds’ with each other, so they inevitably unburden themselves to their wives and girlfriends, expecting them to listen attentively as they drone on about their ‘issues’. They can’t open up to their male buddies about this stuff because they don’t want to appear vulnerable and unmanly. So they unload on their female partners instead.

One of the objections to the military parade in Washington, DC last Saturday – supposedly to mark the 250th birthday of the US Army – is that it was a breach of democratic norms. The real reason it took place, say Donald Trump’s critics, was because he wanted to celebrate his 79th birthday with a display of military might – which is ‘what dictators do’, according to a general who advised him against it. Trump’s opponents gleefully pointed out that the number of attendees – around 200,000 – was dwarfed by the millions who took part in simultaneous ‘No Kings’ protests in dozens of American cities, a reference to his habit of describing himself as a ‘King’.

In the canteen of the House of Lords last week, a friendly server asked me if I’d like some ‘Pride pudding’. This turned out to be a rainbow-coloured crumble created in honour of Pride month. ‘Er, no thanks,’ I said, and then noticed a large ‘Progress Pride’ flag behind the counter. Oh dear, I thought. That’ll set the cat among the pigeons. Sure enough, a couple of hours later the GC Cons Peers’ WhatsApp group erupted. This is made up of those dinosaurs who style themselves ‘gender critical’ – i.e. they believe sex is biological, binary and immutable. For the uninitiated, the Progress Pride flag features a large, multicoloured chevron superimposed on the standard rainbow layout.

I’ve been mulling over Marco Rubio’s latest salvo in the Trump administration’s assault on the Censorship-Industrial Complex. The US Secretary of State has announced he’ll impose visa bans on foreign nationals judged to be censoring US citizens or US tech companies. And according to one news report, the ban will apply to their family members too. So who might be on this blacklist? Rubio hasn’t named names, but I can think of a few candidates. Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH)would be hard-pressed to deny his pro-censorship lobby group targets US citizens and US tech companies, because ‘Centre’ is spelt C-E-N-T-E-R, though the company was set up in the UK.

I’ve just returned from a walking holiday in Northumberland with Caroline and my mother-in-law. I say ‘walking’ but that makes it sound more physically demanding than it was. Billed as ‘gentle guided walking’, it was more like an ambling holiday, and the distances weren’t very great. On the second day, I was anxious to make it to the pub to watch the League One play-off final, so raced ahead and completed the walk – the entire walk – in less than an hour. It was a packaged tour organised by HF Holidays, a co-operative set up as the Holiday Fellowship in 1913 by Thomas Arthur Leonard, a non-conformist social reformer. He wanted to save factory workers from the fleshpots of Blackpool by encouraging them to take walking holidays instead.

Caroline has gone on strike. At least, as far as cooking is concerned. Her case for downing spatulas is that she’s been cooking steak, chicken and bacon for my three sons and me for the best part of 25 years and, as a vegetarian, she’s had enough. Henceforth, she’s going to prepare vegetarian meals. If we’d like to share those with her she’s happy to make enough for all, but if we want something meaty we’re on our own. Now, I wouldn’t mind the occasional nut cutlet and sweet potato – I can even stomach tofu and scrambled egg. But for Caroline, a ‘vegetarian meal’ consists of a fried egg on toast and some spinach leaves. It’s what my sons and I would call a ‘snack’ – and a pretty dreary one at that.

The weekend before last, I came home from walking the dog at about noon to find Caroline asleep in bed. This was surprising for three reasons. She’d been up and about when I left the house. She’s not one for taking naps. And her mother was coming to lunch. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked, prodding her awake. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I felt a headache coming on, took some Nurofen and suddenly started feeling incredibly dizzy. So I decided to lie down for a few minutes and then fell asleep.’ I wasn’t too worried because she does occasionally suffer from dizziness, usually accompanied by a migraine. So I made lunch while her mother went to a chemist and bought Caroline some travel sickness pills that she thought would help.

Last week Caroline sent me an Instagram reel that featured a Norwegian word and its English translation. A ‘tidsoptimist’, I discovered, is ‘someone who is overly optimistic about how much time they have, often underestimating how long tasks will take and therefore frequently running late’. That perfectly describes me. Caroline is punctual to a fault, often arriving early to appointments, and she finds my tardiness intensely irritating. Whenever I have to meet her anywhere – at a friend’s house for dinner, for instance – she will pretend I’m expected 15 minutes beforehand, so when I’m quarter of an hour late I will actually be on time.

In its manifesto, Labour pledged to recruit 6,500 new teachers and the Education Secretary reiterated this a few days after the election. ‘From day one, we are delivering the change this country demands and putting education back at the forefront of national life,’ said Bridget Phillipson. ‘We will work urgently to recruit thousands of brilliant new teachers and reset the relationship between government and the education workforce.’ If that really is her intention, she’s got a funny way of going about it. Last week, I got an email from Ian Hunter, CEO of the multi-academy trust I co-founded, alerting me to a funding shortfall in the next academic year. He’d been notified that the increase in the trust’s general annual grant for 2025-26 is 1.

Could the end of non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) be in sight? As the head of the Free Speech Union, I’ve been campaigning for their abolition for five years and there was a breakthrough this week with the Conservatives unveiling a plan to scrap them. Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, is going to table an amendment to Labour’s Crime and Policing Bill that would make it illegal in almost all circumstances for the police to collect or retain personal data relating to hate incidents where no laws have been broken. For those unfamiliar with this Orwellian concept, an NCHI is a record the police make when someone accuses you of a ‘hate crime’ and they can find no evidence a crime has been committed. That sounds odd.

Within a few months, the constitution that has served this country so well for hundreds of years will yet again be vandalised by a Labour government drunk with power. Tony Blair did what damage he could, what with devolution, the Human Rights Act and the creation of the Supreme Court. But Sir Keir Starmer wants to go further. New Labour’s ‘reform’ of the House of Lords, limiting the number of voting hereditaries to just 92, wasn’t spiteful enough, apparently. A bill is being railroaded through that will reduce that rump to zero. The arguments against this wanton act of destruction should be familiar to most readers. For one thing, the hereds had a better attendance record than life peers in the last parliament – 49 per cent vs 47.

I was having a drink in the Bishops’ Bar in the House of Lords last month when I was introduced to a 92-year-old peer called Lord McColl of Dulwich. I asked him if he’d known my father, Michael, who was made a life peer in 1978. Had they overlapped? He told me he hadn’t merely known him; he’d operated on him. If I have mild indigestion I think I’ve got stomach cancer; if I get a headache I decide it’s a brain tumour I realised with a start that the man I was talking to was the famous surgeon Ian McColl, who was made a life peer in the Queen’s birthday honours list in 1989. As professor of surgery at Guy’s Hospital, he treated my father for bowel cancer in 1983, an operation so successful that Michael had gone on to live for another 19 years.